I got one of those phone calls last week that make your heart skip a beat. On Monday the 7th, I was in London on business. Late in the evening my husband rang me and told me that there had been a horrific car crash in Kilcolgan.
Darren O'Connor and David Quinn had been killed. Darren and David had been part of a group of five lads, including my son, Cormac, who had hung around together constantly.
For a split second I was convinced that Cormac must have been in the car with them. My husband reassured me that he hadn't and explained that Cormac was at the hospital with the rest of their friends. I rang him there. He was devastated, shocked and finding the whole thing very difficult to take on board.
The next few days were heartrending. I had expected tears but I had also expected some of these young people, particularly the teenage boys, to try to put on a brave face. They didn't. There was no bottling up of emotions.
In the two weeks since the accident my son and his friends have been gathering together in groups in each other's homes. So far they have been unable to talk about anything else but the crash. The same phrase is repeated over and over again - "People our age just don't die".
In a way they are right - people that age shouldn't die. But they do. And the experience worldwide is that road accidents are the single largest killer of men aged 15-44. The statistics make horrific reading. Since Henry Lindfield became the first person to die in a crash, when he lost control of his new motor car on his way from Brighton to London in February 1898, 20 million people have died on the roads. Each year half a million people lose their lives and another 15 million are injured.
Oddly, it is the massive scale of the loss of life - and that the deaths tend to happen in ones and twos - that has kept road safety off both national and international agendas.
Normally car crashes get a few column inches somewhere around the fifth page or later. Occasionally a photo of the mangled wreckage will be included if it's gruesome enough, or the pressure on space is not too great. But the bottom line is that ordinary people dying in car crashes just isn't news. There are exceptions where someone famous is involved or the numbers become too great to ignore.
The last fortnight has seen road safety in Ireland move to the front pages and onto the schedules of the current affairs programmes precisely because seven people died in 12 hours and Darren was Christy O'Connor's son.
It is awful that it has taken a convergence of disasters to get people to focus on this problem - but now it has happened we have to take some action.
We already know what causes accidents on the roads and, to be fair, we have made great progress in reducing the number of fatalities. Half the number of people die in car crashes now than 30 years ago even though the number of vehicles on the roads has more than doubled. But that trend is beginning to reverse, particularly in less developed countries. The Red Cross says road accidents will become one of the most common causes of death and disability in the next 20 years, overtaking war, tuberculosis and HIV.
Speeding is the first problem. The National Roads Authority published some research this week that showed that 30 per cent of cars exceeded the speed limit and between 37 per cent and 41 per cent of lorries were over the limit. The current "Serial Killer Within" ads need to be backed up by the visible enforcement of those speed limits. Right now more Garda time and resources are being expended on enforcing the rules of the road than ever before. But the energy is not being expended visibly. I regularly travel along the N4 and N6 without seeing a single speed check.
Dublin Corporation has announced it will be running a pilot scheme using speed check cameras at various accident black spots throughout the city. They are to be applauded and these schemes should be put in place countrywide.
Alcohol is the next problem. Research in the United States shows that those states with lower limits on blood alcohol for drivers have fewer alcohol-related crashes. The area with the lowest number of drink-drivers worldwide is Victoria in Australia. A key part of its regulatory armoury is random breath testing. We must consider its introduction here.
Currently there are 300,000 provisional licence holders travelling on Irish roads. My friend's son is one of them. He applied for his test a year ago, agreed to do his test at any centre in the county and at any time except during his Leaving Cert. Still no word of a test.
The easy way out of this problem would be for the Department of the Environment to ban all those awaiting a test from driving on their own, even if they are on their second provisional licence.
Easy but not fair. Many of these young people use their cars for work or to get to college. They should not be discriminated against because the driver testing system isn't working. The last time we ran into a backlog like this an amnesty was declared.
This time that won't do either. An amnesty won't work because many of these drivers don't realise how little experience or understanding of the Rules of the Road they actually have. And they won't know that until they are tested.
The final problem is that road safety is the responsibility of three separate Government departments and eight outside agencies. It is impossible to properly co-ordinate every one of those groups. We need a single body to be set up with sole responsibility for safety on our roads. This body should set specific targets, be allocated its own budget and have the power to recommend legislation to the Government.
With this agency in place we could introduce road safety education, to start with transition year students. And it would repeat the messages through various media to all age levels. While the toll on young people is disproportionately high, bad driving has no age limits.
I never want to have to go to a funeral where most of the mourners are teenagers who are mystified at the sudden loss of one of their pals. I never want to have to offer my condolences to old friends whose children have been killed. I never want to have to try to come up with some words to comfort anyone whose loved ones have been snatched away by a split-second mistake on the road.